Sharpening and Enhancing Eyes in Photoshop CC

[Fred Woodman]

looking for a few pointers to sharpen and enhance the eyes in my bird pictures. Would appreciate any pointers !!!

[Don Lacy]

Hi Fred on separate layer in PS brighten the eye or eyes slightly with a curve adjustment and use a layer mask and a soft brush.
You can also selectively sharpen the eye with a layer mask after you do your initial sharpening just be careful not to over do it

[Daniel Cadieux]

I do not sharpen the eyes any differently or separately than any other part of the subject, but I do darken the pupil and lighten the iris on many of my images. I use the burn and dodge tools, respectively, both set to tweak "shadows" at 5 to 8% "exposure". I use a smallish brush and work at magnified views to facilitate the "painting". It is easy to over do it, and whatever you do, if you lighten the eye DO NOT lighten the pupil itself as that gives a nasty haze-like look to it.

[Diane Miller]

Or, instead of doing these adjustments directly on a pixel layer copy, you can do them with a Curves adjustment layer, masked appropriately. Adds almost nothing to the file size and is infinitely editable, as long as you don't flatten the master file.

Many of the adjustments in PS are done behind the scenes with curves -- you just get a "simplified" interface. Sometimes the interface is easier, other times, why not do it yourself? You can darken, lighten, change contrast and color balance with a few moves of the curve end points or mid-points.

Sharpening does need to be done on a pixel layer, though.

[Fred Woodman]

Thx again, Ill play with it and see if I can improve it. I am new to PS but have had Lightroom for about a year.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

I use the local adjustment brush in the recent versions of ACR, and I'm assuming Lightroom can do this as well. This also works well to tame clipped highlights; set all parameters to 0 and work with the highlight slider only. regards~Bill

[Fred Woodman]

In Lightroom I used the brush to paint around the eye and then just bumped exposure, clarity, sharpness, contrast/saturation , to get it looking better. But I watched a friend, good PS guy , horrible teacher do eyes on one of my pictures and it was way ahead of what I was doing.

[Arthur Morris]

I use a variety of tricks outlined in the Digital Eye Doctor section of our Digital Basics file. Pretty much everything that do while optimizing my images is detailed in Digital Basics. an e-mailable PDF that is written in my easy-to-follow, easy-to-understand style. Are you tired of making your images look worse in Photoshop? Digital Basics File is an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro basics, my killer image clean-up techniques, Digital Eye Doctor, creating time-saving actions, and lots more.

To lighten the irises and darken the pupils I use small Quick Masks and Curves on a Layer (Control M). And lots more.

[Dan Brown]

Along with the many good tips above, you can also use your proprietary converter to do eye work (Nikon Capture NX2 for sure, not so sure about Canon DPP?). NX2 has "control points" that work nicely for local adjustments of any kind. The adjustment brush in ACR works nicely as has been mentioned. And, both of these techniques are "non-destructive" and can be re-visited in the raw file.

Another trick in PS is to create a new, empty layer, change the blending mode of this new layer to "soft light" and then with the brush tool set to either black or white (to dodge or burn, sort of) and the opacity set to 20% and in most cases, the hardness set to 0, you can zoom in on the eye and lighten or darken subtly. I usually lighten the iris with a soft brush and then darken the pupil with a hard brush that fits the diameter, which gives a nice sharp edge to the pupil. This is all on a seperate layer and therefore is also non-destructive and can be re-worked. I learned this from Mr. Doug Brown!

[Diane Miller]

I prefer the non-destrictive approach of a masked Curve adjustment layer -- total control over lights, darks, contrast and color balance in one adjustment layer. Or two if you need to do different things to the iris and pupil.

[Fred Woodman]

thx again